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Afterimage: Poems
Stephen F. Austin State University Press (2012)Buy it on Amazon

Afterimage is an unsentimental but heartfelt elegy for the landscape and the people of the twentieth-century Midwest. The poems preserve the lost place, the lost time, and lost inhabitants, but Benjamin Vogt also celebrates the earth’s own ability to flower and return, with human assistance and without. These firm and carefully measured poems are a thoughtful delight, one that should not be missed.

-- Andrew Hudgins

Benjamin Vogt's rich, transporting gift is to SEE deeply, generously considering moments and scenes that preceded and sustain the lives we know, to dig curiously and calmly, alert for clues and remnants--to harvest more than any seed promised.

"Excellent as far as it goes and I couldn't help wishing it went further. It sketches the history of making the garden and is very evocative about the garden itself -- the author is a poet as well and it shows. Lively, engaging, personal and entertaining." -- Anne Wareham

"Be careful if you're sipping anything while reading. My keyboard was a little endangered [...] from laughing. Vogt can make even digging out a rock, a task which took several hours, into a wonderful story."
-- Carole Brown

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Morning Glory: A Story of Family & Culture in the Garden 240mp -- 75,000 words -- unpublished (sample)

When
a son reflects on a childhood of gardening with his mother, he finds
clues to a family lineage built around silences, distance, and
forgetfulness. Eventually, his mother begins to openly reveal a past
that confronts the author’s own dark nature. In the history of gardens
there are great tragedies and triumphs, and in the garden we continue to
discover our truest selves.

A
lost son of Oklahoma traces his Mennonite roots through the echo of his
grandmother's diaries. The culture and history of Plains Indians, German
settlers, and prairie wildlife lead the author into America’s frontier
legacy—a wound left unhealed until family is discovered again through
the vanishing landscapes around us.

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Why hello there. Fancy meeting you on the bottom of the page. You should be well aware that everything on this page is copyrighted, and if I find it elsewhere--uncredited and with no permission from me--I will come after you, and you will lose. It's the law. Now you know.